Many people have gotten the impression that, in ancient Greece, Ares was the patron god of Sparta in the same way that Athena was the patron goddess of Athens. This impression, however, is not rooted in any kind of solid historical evidence, but rather solely in the fact that modern people popularly associate Ares and Sparta with many of the same general sorts of things, such as warfare, bloodshed, masculinity, unstoppable fighting abilities, et cetera. To modern observers, Ares seems to embody the Spartan ethos so perfectly that people simply assume without concrete evidence that the Spartans must have adored him.
The truth, though, is that Ares was not the patron god of Sparta in any sense. As one of the Twelve Olympians, he was certainly a significant deity in both Athens and Sparta, but, in both poleis, he was still relatively minor compared to other deities who were far more prominent. Indeed, ironically, Athena actually seems to have had a much more developed cult presence in Sparta than Ares.
The modern notion that Ares was the patron god of Sparta
The claim that Ares was particularly revered in Sparta or even its patron god shows up all over the place on the internet. For instance, the website Villains Wiki has an article titled “Ares” (apparently because the people who write for the Wiki think that Ares is a “villain” in Greek mythology, which isn’t really accurate, but that’s a topic for another day). The current revision of the article includes the following assertion:
“Athens (who primarily worshipped Athena) often wrote him as a psychotic brute and coward, but Sparta worshipped him as their primary deity, as Athens did more trade with the rest of Greece and placed a higher value on diplomacy their outlook on Ares is the one that permeated most of the ancient world.”
This passage is factually inaccurate on several counts, as will become clear over the course of the following sections.
Of course, one might expect a wiki site about villains to contain historically dubious assertions, but the claim that Ares was particularly revered in Sparta also shows up on some websites that someone might expect to be more reliable. Notably, the World History Encyclopedia’s article “Ares,” written by Mark Cartwright, who has an MA in political philosophy, claims:
“Perhaps unsurprisingly, considering the city’s strong militaristic culture Ares was greatly esteemed in Sparta.”
With so many websites claiming that Ares was an especially important god in Sparta, it’s no surprise that many people are confused. There are many questions on Quora that are either based on the assumption that Ares was indeed the patron god of Sparta or asking for clarification about whether he was the patron god of Sparta. Here are some examples:
These are just a few examples.
Now, as it happens, none of the claims I have quoted above are rooted in any kind of historical evidence. On the contrary, the historical evidence indicates that, although Ares was worshipped in Sparta, he was not a particularly important deity there.
ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of the Ares Borghese, a Roman marble statue of the god Ares dating to the first or second century CE, possibly based on an earlier Greek statue, now held in the Louvre Museum
Ares in the Greek world
Before I talk about Ares in Sparta specifically, it is worth discussing how he is generally portrayed in ancient Greek sources. Across a wide range of ancient sources spanning many different Greek cultures over the course of many centuries, he is nearly always portrayed in a very negative light. The Greeks associated him with bloodlust, indiscriminate violence, and carnage—all things that they generally viewed as negative.
The Homeric epics often mention Ares in figurative speech about the devastation of war. For instance, the Iliad 3.125–128 describes the goddess Iris finding Helene of Troy weaving a tapestry at her loom depicting the battles of the Trojans and the Achaians. Here is the description in Greek:
“τὴν δ᾽ εὗρ᾽ ἐν μεγάρῳ: ἣ δὲ μέγαν ἱστὸν ὕφαινε
δίπλακα πορφυρέην, πολέας δ᾽ ἐνέπασσεν ἀέθλους
Τρώων θ᾽ ἱπποδάμων καὶ Ἀχαιῶν χαλκοχιτώνων,
οὕς ἑθεν εἵνεκ᾽ ἔπασχον ὑπ᾽ Ἄρηος παλαμάων:”
This means, in my own translation:
“And she [i.e., Iris] found her [i.e., Helene] in the megaron, and she was weaving a great loom,
double-folded and purple, and she wove in many contests
of the horse-taming Trojans and the bronze-clad Achaians,
who, because of her, were suffering under the palm of Ares. . .”
Just a few lines later, in Iliad 3.131, Iris says to Helene that the Trojans and the Achaians are “ἐπ᾽ ἀλλήλοισι φέρον πολύδακρυν Ἄρηα” (“bearing against each other much-tearful Ares”), using Ares’s name as a metonymy for destructive war itself.
ABOVE: Illustration by the British artist John Flaxman (lived 1755 – 1826) depicting Iris addressing Helene as described in the Iliad
The Homeric epics also characterize Ares himself distinctly negatively, routinely describing him using negative epithets. For instance, in the Iliad 5.31, Athena addresses Ares, calling him “Ἆρες Ἄρες βροτολοιγὲ μιαιφόνε τειχεσιπλῆτα” (“Ares, Ares, bane of mortals, blood-stained stormer of walls”).
Even Ares’s capabilities as a warrior are somewhat open to question. As I discuss at length in this article I wrote in April 2019, it seems like nearly all the best-known myths in which Ares appears involve someone getting the better of him in some manner. In the Iliad 5.385–391, Zeus tells Aphrodite about how the giants Otos and Ephialtes once captured Ares, wrapped him in chains, and trapped him in a jar for thirteen months until Hermes came along and rescued him. Later, in that same book of the Iliad, the mortal Achaian hero Diomedes manages to wound Ares.
Then, of course, Ares’s most famous appearance in the Homeric epics by far is in the Odyssey 8.266–366, where the god Hephaistos catches him in a golden net while he is having illicit sex with Aphrodite (who, in the Odyssey, is portrayed as Hephaistos’s wife) and makes a fool of him by inviting all the gods to come and laugh at him.
Of course, I think that this portrayal of Ares getting constantly beaten is at least partly a result of the so-called “Worf effect,” a storytelling trope that has received its modern name from the Star Trek character Worf, son of Mogh, who is a famous example of it. This trope occurs when a storyteller tries to show that a character is really powerful or skilled at fighting by having them beat a character who has already been established as extremely powerful or skilled at fighting. They then do this so often that the character who is supposedly extremely powerful or skilled starts to look weak because they keep getting beat up.
Nonetheless, I suspect that ancient Greek people also liked telling and hearing stories about Ares getting beat up, because they didn’t like Ares and so they were always rooting against him.
ABOVE: Mars and Venus Surprised by the Gods, painted between c. 1606 and c. 1610 by the Dutch Mannerist painter Joachim Wtewael
It should hardly be surprising that even Ares’s own father Zeus has nothing but scorn for him. In the Iliad, Book Five, after Ares is wounded by Diomedes, he goes to Zeus to whine about being injured. Zeus responds by saying this to him in the Iliad 5.889–891:
“μή τί μοι ἀλλοπρόσαλλε παρεζόμενος μινύριζε.
ἔχθιστος δέ μοί ἐσσι θεῶν οἳ Ὄλυμπον ἔχουσιν:
αἰεὶ γάρ τοι ἔρις τε φίλη πόλεμοί τε μάχαι τε.
μητρός τοι μένος ἐστὶν ἀάσχετον οὐκ ἐπιεικτὸν
Ἥρης: τὴν μὲν ἐγὼ σπουδῇ δάμνημ᾽ ἐπέεσσι:
τώ σ᾽ ὀΐω κείνης τάδε πάσχειν ἐννεσίῃσιν.
ἀλλ᾽ οὐ μάν σ᾽ ἔτι δηρὸν ἀνέξομαι ἄλγε᾽ ἔχοντα:
ἐκ γὰρ ἐμεῦ γένος ἐσσί, ἐμοὶ δέ σε γείνατο μήτηρ:
εἰ δέ τευ ἐξ ἄλλου γε θεῶν γένευ ὧδ᾽ ἀΐδηλος
καί κεν δὴ πάλαι ἦσθα ἐνέρτερος Οὐρανιώνων.”
This means, in my own translation:
“Do not, you capricious fellow, sit alongside me and whine.
You are the most hateful to me of the deities who hold Olympos;
for always to you is strife beloved, and war and battles.
You have the rage of your mother Hera, ungovernable and unyielding,
I with difficulty coerce her with words.
Thus, I suppose it is by her suggestions that you suffer these things.
But truly still I will not allow you to have sufferings too long,
for you are from my lineage, and to me your mother bore you,
but if you were from any other of the deities at any rate, as destructive as you are,
then, since long ago, you would have been lower than the heavenly ones.”
Given this portrayal in Greek literature, it should come as little surprise that Ares was never very widely worshipped in the ancient Greek world. In fact, of the Twelve Olympians, he was probably the least important to actual Greek religious practice. In this, he again stands in contrast to Athena, who was one of the most widely worshipped and respected deities in the Greek pantheon. Even Hestia, who barely appears in any Greek myths, was far more important to actual Greek religious practice than Ares.
Ares was rarely invoked for any reason, he never held any temple or shrine of Panhellenic significance, and the only Greek polis that is ever known to have regarded him as its patron deity was Metropolis in Ionia (kudos to Johannes Walter on Quora for bringing this one to my attention). Most Greek poleis had a minor sanctuary to Ares of some kind someplace, but it was rarely anything hugely important or impressive, nor was it usually cared for by any large staff of priests or priestesses.
This is probably because, to a large extent, ancient Greek religion was about bargaining with the deities. People would make offerings or promises of offerings to the deities in hope that they would give them things that they wanted in return. Ares, though, was rarely a god whom people felt they could trust to bargain with. Thus, in general, people tried to appease Ares and keep him from unleashing his fury against them, but they generally regarded him as a god to be kept at bay.
ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of an Attic black-figure volute-krater by the Nikosthenes Potter dating to between c. 540 and c. 510 BCE, depicting Zeus trying to break up a fight between Athena (on the left) and Ares (on the right)
Menelaos’s epithet ἀρηίφιλος
Everything I’ve said so far has been about Ares in Greek mythology and religion in general. Now I will say a few words about his cult in Sparta in particular.
Someone could argue that Ares is associated with Sparta in the Homeric epics, albeit in a very indirect way. In the epics, Menelaos, the mythical king of Sparta, is frequently given the epithet ἀρηίφιλος (arēíphilos), which can be variously translated as “Ares-beloved,” “dear to Ares,” or “friend of Ares.” To give you a sense of how often this epithet is repeated, here are all the instances where it occurs in books two and three of the Iliad alone: 2.778, 3.21, 3.52, 3.69, 3.90, 3.136, 3.206, 3.232, 3.253, 3.307, 3.430, 3.432, 3.452, and 3.457.
This epithet, however, only indicates that Menelaos was thought to have a special connection to Ares, not Sparta itself. We should not under any circumstances assume that what is said about Menelaos can be applied in any way to Spartan people more generally.
Unfortunately, I’ve noticed before that people have tendency to make this assumption. Notably, the fact that Menelaos is described in the Iliad as ξανθός (xanthós), which means “tawny” and is often translated as “blond” has helped fuel the misconception, which is popular among white supremacists and Neo-Nazis, that the ancient Spartans in general were known for having a higher prevalence of blond hair than other Greeks. (I debunk this misconception at length in this article I wrote in May 2020.)
ABOVE: Detail of a Roman fresco from the atrium of the House of Menander in Pompeii depicting Menelaos seizing a semi-naked Helene of Troy by her hair during the sack of Troy
Apollodoros’s dubious claim of Spartans performing human sacrifices to Ares
Leaving dubious speculations based on Homeric epithets aside, nearly all of what is known about the actual cult of Ares in Sparta comes from extremely late sources written during the Hellenistic period or even the Roman period.
The Greek writer Apollodoros of Athens, who lived in the late second century BCE, claims in a fragment (Die Fragmente der Griechischen Historike, 244 F 125), which has been preserved through summary by the later Neoplatonic philosopher Porphyrios of Tyre (lived c. 234 – c. 305 CE) in his treatise On Abstinence from Killing Animals 2.55, that the Spartans made human sacrifices to Ares. Porphyrios’s summary of Apollodoros occurs in the midst of an account of various peoples that have supposedly practiced human sacrifice. On this list, he includes the Spartans, writing as follows, as translated by Thomas Taylor (with Greek names and spellings restored):
“To which may be added, that the Lakedaimonians, as Apollodoros says, sacrificed a man to Ares.”
This one very brief sentence is all that Porphyrios says on the subject, but the claim he makes here has become widely repeated online.
Historically speaking, it is unlikely that the Spartans really performed human sacrifices to Ares, for three reasons. First, there is no surviving mention of this supposed practice in any ancient source before Apollodoros, despite the fact that rumors of Greeks performing human sacrifices in other contexts are discussed in Classical Greek sources. Second, Apollodoros was writing very late, at a time when Sparta was no longer the independent polis that it had once been and legends about what Spartan customs had been like in their heyday were starting to accumulate.
Third and finally, Apollodoros was an Athenian, so he may have been hostile to the Spartans on account of the Athenians and the Spartans’ age-old rivalry and therefore willing to report hostile rumors without credible evidence to support them.
ABOVE: Medieval manuscript illustration of a debate between the Andalusian philosopher Ibn Rushd and the Neoplatonic philosopher Porphyrios of Tyre, who preserves the fragment from Apollodoros claiming that the Spartans offered human sacrifices to Ares
Pausanias’s account of the cult of Ares in Sparta
The later Greek travel writer Pausanias (lived c. 110 – c. 180 CE), who flourished at a time when Greece was ruled by the Roman Empire, claims in his Guide to Greece 3.14.10 that Spartan youths ritually sacrificed puppies at night to the god Enyalios, who was often equated with Ares, at a place outside the city called Phoibaion. This account is more believable than that of Apollodoros, especially since Pausanias makes it sound like this tradition was still followed in Sparta in his own time. He writes, as translated by W. H. S. Jones and H. A. Ormerod:
“There are other acts performed by the youths, which I will now describe. Before the fighting they sacrifice in the Phoibaion, which is outside the city, not far distant from Therapne. Here each company of youths sacrifices a puppy to Enyalios, holding that the most valiant of tame animals is an acceptable victim to the most valiant of the gods. I know of no other Greeks who are accustomed to sacrifice puppies except the people of Kolophon; these too sacrifice a puppy, a black bitch, to the Wayside Goddess. Both the sacrifice of the Kolophonians and that of the youths at Sparta are appointed to take place at night.”
Pausanias later mentions in his Guide to Greece 3.15.7 that, in Sparta, there was a very ancient cult statue of Enyalios bound in chains. He claims that the chains were meant to keep the god from running away and leaving the city. He writes, in Jones and Ormerod’s translation:
“Near is a temple of Hipposthenes, who won so many victories in wrestling. They worship Hipposthenes in accordance with an oracle, paying him honors as to Poseidon. Opposite this temple is an old image of Enyalios in fetters. The idea the Lakedaimonians express by this image is the same as the Athenians express by their Wingless Nike; the former think that Enyalios will never run away from them, being bound in the fetters, while the Athenians think that Nike, having no wings, will always remain where she is.”
Finally, Pausanias records in his Guide to Greece 3.19.7–8 that there was a small ancient sanctuary of Ares under his own name along a road in Lakonia outside the city of Sparta proper. He says that this sanctuary contained a cult statue that Kastor and Polydeukes—the divine twin half-brothers who were said to be the sons of the mythical Spartan queen Leda and were known as the Dioskouroi or “youths of Zeus”—were said to have taken from the land of Kolchis along the Black Sea. Pausanias writes, in Jones and Ormerod’s translation:
“Of all the objects along this road the oldest is a sanctuary of Ares. This is on the left of the road, and the image is said to have been brought from Kolchis by the Dioskouroi. They surname him Theritas after Thero, who is said to have been the nurse of Ares. Perhaps it was from the Kolchians that they heard the name Theritas, since the Greeks know of no Thero, nurse of Ares. My own belief is that the surname Theritas was not given to Ares because of his nurse, but because when a man meets an enemy in battle he must cast aside all gentleness, as Homer says of Achilles: ‘And he is fierce as a lion’ [Iliad 24.41].”
This concludes our examination of the evidence for the cult of Ares in Sparta. As you can see, the evidence is fairly minimal. His cult seems to have been, at best, pretty standard fare for an Olympian deity in any major Greek city. It’s certainly nothing compared to, say, the cult of Athena in Athens.
The Athenians regarded Athena as their special patron and protector more than any of the other deities. They put Athena’s face on most of their coinage and built multiple major temples to her in their city, including, most famously, the Parthenon, which stands atop the Athenian Akropolis. (For the history of how the Parthenon became so famous, see this article I wrote a little over a week ago, exploring this question.) The Spartans, by contrast, didn’t have a major temple to Ares on their Akropolis and certainly never seem to have regarded Ares as their special patron.
ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of an Athenian silver coin dating to between c. 510 and c 490 BCE, depicting the helmeted head of Athena in profile on the obverse and an owl with an olive branch and the letters ΑΘΕ (short for the archaic Attic spelling of the name Ἀθῆναι) on the reverse
Reasons why the Spartans might not have especially cared for Ares
Some people may be wondering why Ares was not more important to Spartan religion than he was historically. Sadly, it is impossible to give any kind of definitive answer to this question. Nonetheless, I think it may be helpful to point out some noteworthy discrepancies between how Ares is portrayed in Greek mythological sources and how the surviving ancient Greek sources characterize the Spartan ethos. The ancient Greek sources portray the Spartans as placing tremendous importance on the values of εὐνομία (eunomía), meaning “good law” or “good governance,” and σωφροσύνη (sōphrosýnē), meaning “restraint” or “moderation.”
For the Spartans, following εὐνομία meant having good laws and obeying them. As part of this, it was expected for all soldiers to follow all orders at all times. The Greek historian Herodotos of Halikarnassos (lived c. 484 – c. 425 BCE) records in his Histories 7.228.2 that the Spartans set up a two-line poetic epitaph at Thermopylai to commemorate the Spartans who died in the battle there in summer 480 BCE during the invasion of Greece by the Achaemenid Persian Empire under Xerxes I. He quotes the poem as follows:
“ξεῖν᾽, ἀγγέλλειν Λακεδαιμονίοις ὅτι τῇδε
κείμεθα τοῖς κείνων ῥήμασι πειθόμενοι.”
This means, in my own translation:
“Stranger, report to the Lakedaimonians that here
we lie, obedient to their words.”
Notice how the primary emphasis here is not on the Spartans’ bravery or their fighting prowess, but rather on their obedience.
This is one way in which Ares goes totally against everything the Spartans stood for, since a defining aspect of Ares’s personality is that he does not follow orders given to him by anyone. He is instead associated with raw, untamable bloodlust. Zeus literally describes him in that passage from the Iliad I quoted earlier as “capricious” and “ungovernable.”
ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of the modern epitaph at Thermopylai bearing the text of the poem quoted by Herodotos (The original ancient epitaph has not survived.)
Meanwhile, for the Spartans, following σωφροσύνη necessarily entailed always acting with thoughtful consideration, since they thought that acting rashly or out of passion would be likely to result in immoderate or excessive outcomes. Allow me to illustrate with an example. The Athenian historian and general Thoukydides (lived c. 460 – c. 400 BCE) gives a very famous description of the first council of Sparta and its allies before the Peloponnesian War in his Histories of the Peloponnesian War 1.66–88.
First, Thoukydides records the speech (1.68–71) that was supposedly given by the Corinthians, who were allies of Sparta, in which they actually accuse the Spartans of being too moderate and too restrained in their foreign policy, claiming that Spartan hesitation and refusal to intervene has allowed Athens to grow too powerful. The Corinthians therefore urge the Spartans to declare war against the Athenians.
Next, Thoukydides describes the speech given by an anonymous Athenian emissary who he says happened to be present at the meeting (1.72–78), in which the emissary very brazenly and undiplomatically asserts that Athens is strong, that it is the natural order for the strong to rule over the weak, and that Athens will stand up for its interests with military force if necessary.
After this, Thoukydides recounts the supposed speech (1.79–85) of the elderly and highly respected Spartan king Archidamos, in which he carefully warns the Spartans not to declare war rashly, since war brings great suffering and devastation. Finally, Thoukydides records the very short speech (1.86) supposedly given by Sthenelaidas, one of the Spartan ephors, in which he urges the Spartans to declare war to prevent Athens from growing further in power and to protect Sparta’s allies.
As I discuss in this article I wrote back in November 2021 about Thoukydides’s accuracy, the speeches he gives in his history are certainly not verbally accurate reports of what anybody really said, but, in some cases, they may be based on what information Thoukydides had available to him about what was really said. Additionally, even in cases where Thoukydides has completely made the speeches up, he certainly made them up in keeping with what he knew about the general character of the people he was writing about. The Spartans’ reputation as cautious and hesitant to go to war is documented in other historical sources, which suggests that there is probably some truth to it.
Given this reputation of the Spartans, it makes sense that they might find Ares, whose infamous rashness and tendency to barge into situations without caution are defining character traits, not an especially appealing god to worship.
ABOVE: Third-century CE Roman mosaic of the ancient Athenian historian Thoukydides, based on traditional iconography
Major deities who were worshipped in Sparta
Now that we’ve talked about Ares, a god who was relatively unimportant in Sparta, I think I should probably talk about some of the deities who were very important in Sparta. Sparta didn’t have a single patron deity in the same manner as Athens, but some deities were still considered especially important there—particularly Zeus, Athena, Apollon, Artemis, and the Dioskouroi.
The following overview of the major deities in Sparta relies in part on Nicolas Richer’s chapter “The Religious System at Sparta” (pp. 236–252) in A Companion to Greek Religion, edited by Daniel Ogden and published in 2007 by Blackwell Publishing. There are, however, certainly many other scholarly resources out there about Spartan religion.
I suppose the best place to start is at the beginning. Possibly the oldest surviving written source from ancient Sparta is the Great Rhetra, a political text written in obscure, archaic Greek, probably sometime around 700 BCE or thereabouts, that is preserved through quotation by the Greek biographer and Middle Platonist philosopher Ploutarchos of Chaironeia (lived c. 46 – after c. 119 CE) in his biography The Life of Lykourgos 6.2 and 8.
The very beginning of the Great Rhetra references “the foundation of a sanctuary of Zeus Skyllanios and Athena Skyllania.” Later, the text references the Apellai, a festival of the god Apollon. It therefore attests the importance of the worship of Zeus, Athena, and Apollon in early Sparta.
Apollon and Artemis
In later times, which are much better historically attested, the most important Spartan religious festivals were probably the Karneia, the Hyakinthia, and the Gymnopaidia, all of which were dedicated to Apollon.
Apollon’s tremendous importance to the ancient Spartans is further underscored by the fact that, according to a legend first recorded by Herodotos in his Histories 1.65, the Spartan lawgiver Lykourgos supposedly radically reformed Spartan society and the Spartan constitution at the behest of the oracle of Apollon at Delphoi. Thus, according to the legend, the Spartan constitution and the laws that governed Spartan society actually came from Apollon himself. Although this legend is almost certainly apocryphal, it was widely believed in antiquity.
Meanwhile, probably the most important temple in ancient Sparta was the temple of the goddess known by the epithet Ὀρθία (Orthía), who was widely identified as an aspect of Apollon’s twin sister Artemis. The sheer importance that Orthia’s temple held is evidenced by the fact that archaeologists have found over 100,000 lead votive figurines dedicated there to the goddess, depicting various figures, including a female figure with wings (who may be the goddess Orthia herself), soldiers in armor with weapons, and various animals.
ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons showing the ruins of the temple of Artemis Orthia in Sparta, taken in May 2019
ABOVE: Photograph from the Metropolitan Museum of Art website showing one example of a lead figurine from the temple of Artemis Orthia in Sparta, dating to the late seventh or sixth century BCE, depicting a winged female figure, possibly Orthia herself
The Spartans also held an annual festival in honor of Orthia. The Athenian historian Xenophon (lived c. 430 – c. 354 BCE) claims in his treatise On the Constitution of the Lakedaimonians or On Spartan Society 2.7–9 that the Spartan lawgiver Lykourgos encouraged Spartan boys to steal food, but he says that Lykourgos ordered the boys who were caught stealing to be whipped for being incompetent thieves. He also says that there was an event, which probably took place during the festival of Orthia, in which cheeses would be piled on Orthia’s altars, guarded by people with whips, and the Spartan boys would try to sneak by and steal the cheeses without getting caught and whipped.
As I discuss in this article I wrote about fun facts about ancient Sparta in January 2021, in much later times, the Spartans developed a rather shocking and spectacular ritual, which is first attested in the first century BCE. During the festival of Orthia, in front of a large crowd, they would whip local adolescent boys (who were most likely volunteers) on the altars of Orthia until their backs were covered in blood. The boys, in turn, would show no visible sign of pain whatsoever, proving to the astonished onlookers how manly they were and immune to pain.
The Roman orator Marcus Tullius Cicero (lived 106 – 43 BCE) personally visited Sparta and saw the flagellation of the Spartan boys on the altars of Orthia. He describes the experience, writing in his Tusculan Disputations 5.14, as translated by C. D. Yonge:
“The boys at Sparta are scourged so at the altars that blood follows the lash in abundance; nay, sometimes, as I used to hear when I was there, they are whipped even to death; and yet not one of them was ever heard to cry out, or so much as groan.”
The ritual evidently made quite the impression on him, because he describes it again in his Tusculan Disputations 5.27, writing, in Yonge’s translation:
“Spartan boys will bear to have their bodies torn by rods without uttering a groan. I myself have seen at Lacedaemon troops of young men, with incredible earnestness contending together with their hands and feet, with their teeth and nails, nay, even ready to expire, rather than own themselves conquered.”
As late as the fourth century CE, the Spartans still seem to have practiced this whipping ritual annually, attracting tourists from all over the Roman Empire.
ABOVE: Illustration of the infamous Spartan whipping ritual from the 1911 novel The Coward of Thermopylae by Caroline Dale Snedeker
Athena
Ironically, contrary to popular perception, Athena seems to have had a much more developed cultic presence in Sparta than Ares. While Ares apparently only had what seems to have been a fairly small, minor sanctuary outside the city of Sparta itself, there was a major temple to Athena located on the Spartan Akropolis. Pausanias records in his Guide to Greece 3.17.2 that this temple was dedicated to her under her epithets Χαλκίοικος (Chalkíoikos), meaning “Bronze-Housed,” and Πολιοῦχος (Polioûchos), meaning “City Protector.”
The ruins of this temple still exist today and have been excavated. They admittedly don’t look especially impressive; the Parthenon in Athens is certainly far more imposing. Nonetheless, this temple seems to have been a very important one for the ancient Spartans.
ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons showing the ruins of the Temple of Athena Chalkioikos on the Spartan Akropolis, taken in April 2018
The Dioskouroi
Finally, the last set of deities who were especially revered in Sparta were Kastor and Polydeukes, who, as I have already mentioned, were known together as the Dioskouroi or the Tyndaridai. The oldest attested tradition of their parentage, which is found in the Odyssey 11.298–304, holds that they were both sons of the Spartan king Tyndareus.
The more famous tradition, though, which first attested by the Theban poet Pindaros (lived c. 518 – 438 BCE) in his “Tenth Nemean Ode,” holds that the Dioskouroi were born as twins of the same mother, Leda, but Kastor was the son of Tyndareus and Polydeukes was the son of Zeus. According to Pindaros’s version of the story, a man named Idas killed Kastor in a fight over cattle and Polydeukes chose to share his immortality with his brother so that they would trade places each day, with one of them living on Mount Olympos among the deities while the other stayed in the Underworld.
In any case, the Spartans regarded the Dioskouroi as protectors of the army. They represented the twin brothers using an aniconic symbol known as the δόκανα (dókana), which took the form of two upright poles with a cross-bar linking them. There are numerous surviving examples of this symbol and Ploutarchos of Chaironeia explains its symbolism in his treatise On Fraternal Love 1 (= Moralia 478a–b).
Thus, clearly, there were many deities who were especially important to the Spartans—but Ares was not one of them.
ABOVE: Sketch of a dokana, from Nicolas Richer’s chapter “The Religious System at Sparta,” page 240
Even Aphrodite was more worshipped as “Aphrodite Areia” among the Spartans than Ares it seems.
We know that there were at least two temples to Aphrodite in the city of Sparta itself, one of which apparently had an upper story, according to Pausanias in his Guide to Greece 3.15.10. So yes, the cult of Aphrodite does seem to have been more prominent in Sparta than that of Ares.
Yep. It’s one of the few places where she was worshipped as a war goddesses, which isn’t something most people with some familiarity with greek myth associates Aphrodite with.
Ares: “What do you mean I’m only the third-most-popular war god in Sparta? Hades, since when we’re there more than two of us?”
Hades: “Actually, Aphrodite’s association with war is—”
Ares: “I wasn’t asking you!”
(Well, probably the fifth or less, once we account for the Dioskouroi. But I think the joke works better without them.)
Lovely piece, as always, but a correction. The outline sketch showing Iris with Helen is the work of John Flaxman (1755-1826), a very influential sculptor and draughtsman. Haeckel is just the guy who uploaded the image to Wikipedia.
Oops! Thanks for the correction. I have now edited the caption to make it correct.
Another very interesting article! Thanks, Spencer.
You’re welcome! I’m so glad that you enjoyed the article!
Just a brief, off-topic question: why ‘AΘΕ’ (with short ‘E’), when Athena’s name had a long /e:/ in the second syllable? Shouldn’t it have been ‘AΘH’? Was eta only added to the Greek alphabet later on?
That’s a great question—and one for which I most certainly have an answer!
The Old Attic alphabet, which Athens used for most of the fifth century BCE, did not include the letter eta ⟨H⟩. Instead, it used the letter epsilon ⟨E⟩ to represent both the sound it normally represented and the sound that the letter eta represented in other Greek alphabets. The Old Attic alphabet also included the letter heta ⟨H⟩, which looks just like an eta, but it represents the aspirate /h/, the same sound represented by the letter aitch ⟨H⟩ in the Latin alphabet.
In 403/2 BCE, shortly after the overthrow of the Thirty Tyrants and the restoration of democracy, the Athenians officially voted to adopt the Ionic Greek alphabet at the suggestion of the archon Eukleides. Other poleis followed Athens’ lead and, by the Hellenistic Era, the Ionic alphabet had become the standard Greek alphabet, replacing various local alphabets that had existed before that point.
Thanks! I’ve learnt something new.
Enlightening, well-reasoned, and well-sourced, as ever.
The history of Sparta only shows interventionist actions, for example in Egypt, after they had won the Peloponnesian war–I think that, culturally, they had no internal remedy for the sudden quick shot of triumphalism and they forgot who they were as soon as they had won a fight in which they had aggressed–hardly the first example of a people having this collective misadventure. Prior to that, even in Syracuse, where they had a modest level of culturally-enforced hegemony, they did not meddle, let alone shove and command, as they might have done.
There is an obvious good reason for this: the Spartans we read about had their hands full keeping the majority of Lakedaimonia in bondage–such was the “warfare” in which their sense of martial honor was really rooted. No slave-holder likes chaos like Ares might bring.
I have never arrived at a satisfactory correlation of foreign adventurism with the eventual success of the Helot rebellions–but I suspect it might have been one factor. They were set up as a formidable defensive power and as rather successful oppressors–but they were not set up for hegemony or conquest. Ares has nothing to offer them and I doubt they ever had to debate that much amongst themselves.
BTW–I caught one misspelling–“Spartan boys to steal fool” should of course be ‘food’.
The Spartans did, in fact, sometimes intervene in other states before their victory in the Peloponnesian War. One fairly obvious example that stands out is the occasion when, in 510 BCE, they invaded Attike and drove out the tyrant Hippias from Athens. It is, however, true that they tended to be very reserved about making foreign interventions, in part because they did not want to leave their forces too weak on the ground at home out of quite justified fear that the helots might rebel.
I have no idea how that spelling error got there and I didn’t catch it. I read through every single section of this article out loud multiple times before publishing it specifically to make sure there weren’t any mistakes like that. Somehow I must have missed that one, even though it seems like it should have been really obvious. Thank you so much for pointing that out. I have now corrected it.
i read it all
Really enjoyed this, as a philakone for many decades. I want to go read the article about “blond” Spartan myth now. Xanthos = golden, tawny — so translations of the “red-haired” Menelaus are wrong? Similarly, Boudicca is so commonly referred to as being a titian-haired warrioress, but she is also noted as “xanthos,” so in reality seems to have been a blonde Celtic Briton, not a wild Irish caricature. Pyrrhus / Neoptolemus would seem a more natural red-head, according to how I understand the Greek terms (and apologies for the Latinizations here. Familiarity.) How about the references to the “fair-haired Dorians” in classical sources? They seem to have regarded these later interloper tribes as less dark-haired than the Achaeans. Either way, it is appalling to me to see the entire issue, along with other pop-culture “Spartan” tropes, being co-opted and subverted/perverted by contemporary neo-Nazis.
Following up on the earlier comment! because I’ve gone back to read the post about “blond” Spartans and that Comments section is closed and I can see why, especially after reading the recent blog entry about new rules for discussions here. That was an article that was moved in on by advocates of a certain political agenda and caught on fire.
The original post was erudite and informed and it’s a shame so many people now want to bend history to their wishes and fantasies rather than being concerned with accuracy and the truth.
Interesting to read that the “Dorian invasion” is now in dispute — my shelves must be full of too many out-of-date books! I recall that there was once a debate about the influence (or lack thereof) of Slavic bloodlines in modern Greeks, dating from the early Byzantine era and the incursions and settlements of Slavs throughout Greece, particularly the Peloponnesus. Did this question ever get resolved to anyone’s satisfaction?
Finally, it was interesting to learn more about this “The Coward of Thermopylae” book, which I only learned about today but now know is not anything I need to seek out. Here’s another historical novel from that era that I think IS worth looking for, however — “A Victor of Salamis” by William Stearns Davis (pub. 1907; reprinted in 1935 and 1963). The style is lively and engaging and the Persian Wars setting vivid. Historical figures like Themistocles and Leonidas share some time with the fictitious characters and the battle sequences are striking. One thing that you may mark and find amusing given this “blond Spartans” talk — in this book, it’s the PERSIANS who are represented as true “Aryans”, and their noblemen and women have the blond hair and are full of self-proclaimed “Aryan virtues.” Talk about a turnaround!
One problem is that many moderns tend to see worshiping a god as like being like the denomination you belong to, not like a particular holiday.
Great read!
I found you via ACOUP, which I was initially recommended because of his “This. Isn’t. Sparta” series, so I guess I’m just a sucker for attempts to dispel the Mirage.
The pop-cultural lens is an interesting way to try and figure out the etymology of this wrong idea (like the Villains wiki; I also liked your theory about us moderns’ relation to/conception of war in the the “Ares the Most Pathetic” post). Another possible pop cultural source of the idea, that I know of as a D&D player: I think many nerds in the overlap between fantasy fiction and popular conceptions of the classics tend to imagine ancient polytheism as the Christianity-inflected “henotheism” of the former genre, where you acknowledge that all the deities exist but you pick one and don’t cheat on them (like Mary Catelli said, your “denomination”). In that (fictional!) context, two rival city-states with two different war gods as patrons would fit perfectly.
(Re-)learning how diverse and complicated real world ancient polytheism was compared to the staler genre tropes is always a treat, so thanks!
Thank you so much for the positive feedback! I am so glad to hear that you are enjoying my work.
I’ve been a great admirer of Bret Devereaux’s blog for well over a year now. I was truly thrilled when I saw that he had recommended my post about how Ares wasn’t really the patron god of Sparta.
I think you make an excellent point about this misconception possibly being rooted in broader misconceptions about the nature of ancient polytheism. I think it is very likely that you are correct.